Religion: Separate--or Secular?

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Some churchmen cheered when the Supreme Court ruled (Si) for Agnostic Vashti McCollum in her suit against religious education on school property (TIME, March 22). Others, however, were not so sure there was anything to cheer about. Among them were 28 top Protestant leaders, including Bishops Angus Dun and William Scarlett, and Reverends Reinhold Niebuhr, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Henry P. Van Dusen and Douglas Horton. They issued a statement deploring the Supreme Court decision, believed that it would "greatly accelerate the trend toward the secularization of our culture." In the current issue of Christianity and Crisis, Professor John C. Bennett of Union Theological Seminary tells where he thinks the significance of the McCollum and other high court decisions really lies. Writes Bennett:

"As a nation we are moving from the idea that the State should be neutral as between the churches or religious faiths, to the idea that the State should be neutral as between all positive forms of religion on the one side and an aggressive secularism on the other . . .

"The one common form of aggressive secularism ... is the tendency to make the institutions and assumptions of American democracy into a religious faith or into a substitute for religious faith . . . So, gradually we may find ourselves a nation in which the conviction-forming agencies of all sorts which are aided by the State will count against rather than for religious faith. That would be the opposite of the intention of many who have contributed to the result, including those Protestants who fail to discern the full meaning of the current interpretation of the Constitution."